Download the image/zip file from the download location. Verify that the download completed successfully.
After that, install Etcher ( sudo pacman -S etcher if on Archlinux/Manjaro) and burn it to an SD card (8 GB or larger).
Put the SD card into SD card slot and boot it up. The Device should recognise the SD card as a bootable device and boot from it.
On the first boot it will display an OEM installer. After you have made your choices it will reboot into your newly setup system. (This is Manjaro OEM Installer script which I ported to Arch)
There is one more login by alarm
user/password = alarm/alarm
This login will be disabled in future builds.
What is Working
Booting
HDMI
Network ports (All are working, DHCP is enabled on all.)
What’s Not Working
Audio Over HDMI.
alarm login will not work on lxqt as the ownership is removed. (will remove the login in future)
You test and Let me know.
Credits:
Manjaro Arm Team for helping me with armv7 and their tools.
@frank-w for his R2 Kernel and his valuable time and support.
I would like to know the use cases of R2 with ArchLinux, Please share your feedback whether I should maintain Server(Headless) or Desktop Environment (DE) Images.
Is there any real use of DE for R2? If yes then I will maintain DE versions, Else only Server img.
imho only a basic server image is needed because everyone can install desktop-environment by himself (every user wants a different DE,but most DEs are too slow).
Yes but it is always better to have a desktop ready img for direct users. As Installing DE later is not so good experience in my case. As I tried installed lxqt on debian and cursor is super slow. But thanks for your recommendation. I can keep Server and LXQT if needed.
On r2 you can use sd-card img with emmc,but you need to change uboot-config (partition 0:1 instead of 1:1 and root) and fstab (change to root) and flash preloader to boot0-block (maybe change hw-partitionlayout needed).preloader and partition-layout needs to be done only once
Yes I would like to install it and do some testing but I have very limited time today. Tomorrow after work I’ll try and do some tests.
Update: I had a little time today and booted the Arch image with success, but I could not test the Internet connection since the pppoe/ppp package is not installed in the provided Arch image.
So in this case will I need to move the PPPoE connection to another router and connect the BananaPi-R2 behind it using DHCP then install the PPPoE related packages and after that doing some tests (sometime in this week).
@spikerguy Hi, thanks a lot for putting this image together! I recently got my BPi R2 and just wanted to share my initial experience. Installed using your latest image and for sure HDMI and Ethernet work fine (got an IP just fine w/ dhcpcd on wan port).
I was able to run pacman -Syu successfully and install xorg, everything seems to work fine so far.
Are there any packages that cannot be upgraded without breaking hw support?
A starter DE image would be great for beginners (e.g. LXDE), although I personally am ok with a headless image since I set up my own desktop environment anyways. I will share a guide with full system setup as soon as I am done and share more feedback on which devices are working and which are not.
As a side note, I am having a bit of a hard time following the progress of mainline kernel support for R2 vs custom kernels. This is definitely an area for improvement in the BPi community
R2 will have custom kernel only as it is mtk and need a lot of custom codes to make things work, while mtk team and frank is trying their best to push things to mainline.
Btw this is a very old img and it won’t break as hardware support nor it will add any support. As I never updated the kernel for it after that release. You can still get all updated packages from the arch repo.
Thanks for testing.
